Freedom of Information Act 2000 Request

Requests for information regarding complaints in the last five financial years

Request

For each of the last five financial years, please provide the following information:

1. The number of complaints made to the CPS.
2. The number of legal complaints.
3. The number of non-legal complaints.
4. Please provide a definition and if possible examples of what constitutes a legal complaint and what constitutes a non-legal complaint.
5. The breakdown of complaints by resolution.
6. If possible, please also provide a breakdown of the complaints by complaint type, or whichever subcategories you use to categorise complaints

Response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) holds data regarding the number of complaints relating to Legal Decisions, Mixed (Legal and Non-Legal) Decisions and Non Legal Decisions made, received each financial year since 2014/15 until 2018/19. This data can be found in the attached table and should be read in conjunction with the caveats appended to it.

Definitions and examples of legal and non-legal complaints are published on the CPS website. Due to the accessibility of this data we are not obliged to provide a response to part four in accordance with section 21 of the FOIA – Information accessible by other means. Please see the attached Section 17 Refusal Notice for an explanation of this exemption.

For assistance, the information requested in part four can be located within our Feedback and Complaints Guidance which can be accessed via the following links:

https://www.cps.gov.uk/feedback-and-complaints The CPS records the number of complaints that were not upheld, part upheld, upheld and withdrawn. The outcome of a complaint is the resolution of the last stage recorded for each complaint. Please see the attached table for this data.

The CPS does not centrally hold a breakdown of the nature of a Legal, Non-Legal or a Mixed complaint. In order to retrieve this information it would be necessary to manually extract the specific nature of a complaint as recorded by the local CPS Area/Central Casework Unit in which the complaint originated.

As an indication of the work this would involve there were a total of 983 resolved complaints, at the first stage of the complaints process and beyond, during the most recent financial year 2018/19 alone.

Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act means public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it estimates the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for central government is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3.5 working days determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

A manual examination of in excess of 983 complaints would therefore exceed the appropriate cost limit and we are therefore not obliged to respond to part six of your request.

Information Management Unit 020 3357 0788 IMU@cps.gov.uk